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Thursday, August 27, 2015

A Visit to San Francisco; Last Portland Book-Signing

A few odds and ends. Let's start with this. I will be at the Powell's in Beaverton on Monday. It is the last scheduled book-signing in Portland (and Oregon), so if you have any interest in chatting with me about the book in person, this will the final chance around these parts. (My book tour continues in other parts of the country: full schedule here.)

For those of you who can't attend any events on my book tour but would like a signed copy, you can still order them through Powell's--but only until Monday. It looks like you can order signed copies of the softcover, hardcover, or "library bound" edition (no clue) there. Meanwhile, as the tour unfolds, I hope to be sitting down with brewers and beer people at select locations as I move about the country. My first installment is up at All About Beer. I had the chance to sit down with Dave McLean of Magnolia Brewing, and saw the world through his pub's window, sitting as it does one block east of the intersection of Haight and Ashbury.

McLean was at the tail end of the flower child migration (it seemed
to die with Jerry Garcia), and he still embodies a part of that ideal.
The pub was just coming alive as we sat down to talk, and the stereo’s
first track, the Dead’s Franklin’s Tower, poured out as he described the
changes he’d witnessed as two subsequent migrations had changed the
city outside his doors.

“I came two years after the ’89 quake, so there was still a
post-quake recession going on. It felt pretty sleepy when I got here. It
was nice; the East Coast was very frenetic and people were hanging out
in the parks. It was a nice time to come. Then the first dot-com boom
took off just after I opened Magnolia—’98, ’99. It felt big at the time:
the streets got more crowded, traffic got bad, restaurants were hard to
get into. And then it crashed. 2001 was the bust, and that was the one
year we didn’t have growth at this location. And then the slow climb
back up to this crazy, current time which feels like an order of
magnitude bigger than the first round. Everybody wants to live in the
city; that’s different from the first round. There’s a lot of simmering
resentment and anger because people are losing their apartments—there’s
an interesting class economics dynamic that’s dominating all the news
and papers and blogs.”